Encountering animals after Wittgenstein. Exploring the potential of descriptive ethics to provide moral criticism

The project aims to understand whether descriptive ethics after Wittgenstein (EAW) can account for moral criticism by using animal ethics as a study case. Such an approach to ethics has historically been in contrast with moral individualism (MI). The latter holds that moral theory provides adequate guidance in our moral life and that what we owe to an individual can be determined exclusively by looking at her intrinsic characteristics, such as sentience. In contrast to MI, EAW focuses on the nuances and differences that characterise each context. Furthermore, EAW suggested that we should depart from how we already conceptualise and encounter animals in our practices and that moral theory cannot play a predominant role in our lives (e.g., Diamond 1978; Crary 2010). Hence, on the one hand, moral individualism departs from a theory-oriented approach which prescribes us to discover which individuals have specific morally relevant characteristics. On the other, EAW's practice-oriented method claims that we find proper moral guidance by departing from the nuances of our moral life. The latter have been dismissed and criticised as providing a merely descriptive approach to morality, thereby losing the possibility of conducting substantial criticism. If one describes what is already the case, there is the risk of justifying the status quo. Hence the project aims to assess whether EAE can, after all, allow for moral criticism and, at the same time, take into account the plurality that characterises our moral life. The project thereby aims to contribute to the broader research context of methods in applied ethics. Before answering the main research question, the project will have to substantiate EAW's position by a) understanding how describing the diversity of human-animal interaction can provide us with a plurality of normative frameworks and b) explaining the connection between practice-oriented and theory-oriented approaches.From a methodological point of view, the Wittgensteinian notion of aspect-perception will play a crucial role: the first task will address a) by explaining moral diversity in the light of aspect-perception. This task will focus on understanding the link between encountering animals in a different context - hence, seeing and describing them in different ways – and having access to different norms and obligations. The project's second task will be to address b) and therefore test whether EAW substantiated with aspect-perception can account for and encompass theory-oriented approaches – such as moral individualism. In order to do so, the task will be dedicated to exploring whether MI implicitly relies on specific conceptualisations and aspects of the animal and what role these aspects play in moral theory.The third and last task will assess whether EAW, substantiated with the project's results, can secure a critical potential. Since EAW maintains that we do not have access to external sources of criticism and that we have to consider the practice from within, this task aims to test whether ethics after Wittgenstein can be understood as an instance of immanent criticism. That is a critique that finds the normative potential for moral change within a specific practice and does not rely on external concepts and principles.

ÖAW DOC

Messerli Forschungsinstitut für Mensch-Tier-Beziehung